Saturday, 23 July 2011

Starz apparently showed a fantastic trailer for Spartacus: Vengeance at Comic-Con yesterday, but that hasn't hit the internet yet. But we do have the briefer tease (above), which gives you an idea of the increased scale of production in season 2 (horse-riding sequences set against greenscreen will be achieved), plus our first look at Liam McIntyre (replacing Andy Whitfield as the eponymous Thracian warrior).

McIntyre, speaking at Comic-Con:

"It's a great privilege, a great honor, it's a great responsibility. I was a fan. I would have been sitting down there [in the audience]. All of a sudden, I find myself sitting up here. Everyone can agree Andy [Whitfield] was amazing. The best thing I can do is bust my ass and honor that legacy trying to make season 2 as amazingly as exciting as season 1. And that's all I can do."

The Comic-Con panel, which included showrunner Steven S. DeKnight, also confirmed the return of Ashur and that the story will cleave close to how Stanley Kubrick's movie version ended.

SPARTACUS: VENGEANCE returns to Starz in January 2012.

Comic-Con also gave us a four-minute trailer for The Walking Dead's second season, which certainly looks promising. I didn't really like the first season, which fell flat for me after an entertaining feature-length pilot. Showrunner Frank Darabont has apparently recruited a team of writers who are actually fans of the comic-book now, so I hope that means there'll be more passion on display. Last year's was almost excruciatingly earnest and lacked a sense of pace, rhythm, and... well, enough zombies biting people.

I still have my doubts about The Walking Dead, though. I think there's an audience who will watch anything with zombies in it, those people number greatly, and there's no alternative for them on TV. This will be a hit whatever it does. But for me, I didn't really like any of the characters, and because I can't see a plausible solution for a zombie apocalypse, a TV series of this nature has a constant feeling of futility and depression. A zombie movie can be brilliant if depressing, but you're done with it in two-hours. The Walking Dead could be on-air for another five years or more. By the time Andrew Lincoln's blasting a corpse in the head for the sixtieth time, I'm just not sure I'll care, but we'll see if season 2 manages to change my mind. At least from the trailer it looks like the characters are on the move, instead of hanging around that tedious mountain camp.